Library System Development and Programming for Change; Working Paper No. 1.

Wayne State Univ., Detroit, MI. Univ. Libraries.

Points stressed in this paper are: (1) Librarians can only function as professionals within an institution; (2) Every institutional organization's operation can only be understood within a social context; (3) Academic resource libraries are under stress, both financially and functionally, which is expressed by many as a need for innovation; (4) Wayne State University has an administrative and managerial structure that has operated well in the past three decades; (5) Change in organizational structure requires a transfer of information among specialists; (6) There are barriers to communication which arise from organizational structure and from specialized functions; (7) To effect changes in an organization certain kinds of information transfer are necessary and social scientists have been able to generalize these processes to the point where individuals outside an organization, using these generalized concepts, can cause change to take place within an organization; (8) Within every organization, specialists arrange themselves within certain roles to protect the functioning of the organization; and (9) Although changes can be brought about through the use of knowledge of the specialists within an organization, management techniques for gathering information and effecting change have been developed which are directly applicable to libraries. (Related papers are available as LI 003179, 003180 and 003181) (Author)